Passion News Round-up

I mentioned on Wednesday the report that Gibson was to cut the Matt. 27.25, "His blood be on us and on our children", from the film and that we were going round in circles on this one. Now the inevitable pull back on this story -- Reuters report that "A spokesman for the Hollywood star . . . . declined to comment on the report"; the spokesman is the publicist Alan Nierob:

Mel Gibson stays mum on "Passion" scene

Summary: It's in, it's out, it's in again, it's out, no comment.

This article from the Seattle Times argues that there is a "symbiotic and mutually beneficial" relationship between Mel Gibson, director of The Passion of the Christ and the ADL (Anti-Defamation League):

Anti-Defamation League plays into Gibson's hands
By David Klinghoffer

. . . . . So what did ADL think its relentless criticism of "The Passion" would accomplish? Gibson is the last person in all of Hollywood to bow to hostile pressure to edit his work. A news story this week suggested that the filmmaker may have cut an inflammatory verse from Matthew's Gospel — but this was due to reactions of friendly screening audiences, not thanks to the ADL, which continues to attack the film.

As the Seattle-based interfaith activist Rabbi Daniel Lapin observes, Gibson is the guy who made "Braveheart" and identifies with its hero, William Wallace, a 13th-century Scottish warrior who gladly accepts disembowelment rather than submit to intimidation and tyranny.

The ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, genuinely cares about the Jewish people, but his group is inevitably affected by the pressures of funding a large, nonprofit organization. The imperative to convince donors that you fight an urgent fight is overwhelming. The ADL has a $40 million yearly budget to raise.

The perilous logic of the anti-defamation business demands that the ADL find "dangers" to denounce, even when those dangers, if left alone, would have been neutralized simply by their own nature — in this case, by the eccentricity of a Latin-Aramaic screenplay. Gibson's purposes positively required that he be denounced.

He played the ADL as William Wallace played the bagpipe. The relationship between anti-defamation watchdogs and alleged defamer is symbiotic and mutually beneficial. What dangers it has unleashed for the rest of us remain to be seen.